Re: [LSF/MM TOPIC] Using XArray to manage the VMA

From: Laurent Dufour
Date: Fri Mar 29 2019 - 05:31:59 EST


Adding Michel and David in the loop who are interested in this topic too.

Le 13/03/2019 Ã 19:01, Matthew Wilcox a ÃcritÂ:
On Wed, Mar 13, 2019 at 04:10:14PM +0100, Laurent Dufour wrote:
If this is not too late and if there is still place available, I would like
to attend the MM track and propose a topic about using the XArray to replace
the VMA's RB tree and list.

If there isn't room on the schedule, then Laurent and I are definitely
going to sneak off and talk about this ourselves at some point. Having a
high-bandwidth conversation about this is going to be really important
for us, and I think having other people involved would be good.

If there're still spots, it'd be good to have Liam Howlett join us.
He's doing the actual writing-of-code for the Maple Tree at the moment
(I did some earlier on, but recent commits are all him).

Using the XArray in place of the VMA's tree and list seems to be a first
step to the long way of removing/replacing the mmap_sem.
However, there are still corner cases to address like the VMA splitting and
merging which may raise some issue. Using the XArray's specifying locking
would not be enough to handle the memory management, and additional fine
grain locking like a per VMA one could be studied, leading to further
discussion about the merging of the VMA.

In addition, here are some topics I'm interested in:
- Test cases to choose for demonstrating mm features or fixing mm bugs
proposed by Balbir Singh
- mm documentation proposed by Mike Rapoport

Laurent.